Various agents consisting of organopolysiloxanes and silicone compound compositions have been proposed in attempts to impart a variety of valuable properties to textile fibers, such as water repellency, softness, lubricity, anti-pilling, good laundry and dry cleaning durability, and the like. There continues to be a need to improve these and other desirable properties of the textiles. In particular, there is increasing demand of textiles with excellent water repellency.
It is generally known that water repellent fluoroacrylates can be undesirable and may bioaccumulate in living organisms due to fluorinated groups. Currently, fluorinated water repellent agents predominate the market and most are long chain perfluorinated group-containing compounds (8 carbon atoms). There have been attempts to replace those long chain perfluorinated group-containing compounds with short-chain fluorocarbons; however, it is unclear if short perfluorinated group-containing compounds avoid undesirable features. Compared to such fluorine compounds, silicones are more desirable and have a lower surface tension to impart water repellency. Thus, conventional amino silicones, epoxy modified silicones, hydrogen silicones and silanols have been proposed to replace fluorocarbon water repellent agents, but have demonstrated inferior initial water repellency and lower washing fastness.